Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen____ Empirischen______Literaturwissenschaft

Herausgegeben von Reinhold Viehoff (Halle/Saale) Gebhard Rusch (Siegen)

Jg. 25 (2006), Heft 1

Peter Lang Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften SPIEL Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft

SPIEL: Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft

Jg. 25 (2006), Heft 1

Peter Lang Frankfurt am Main • Berlin • Bern • Bruxelles • New York • Oxford • Wien Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über abrufbar.

ISSNISSN 2199-80780722-7833 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2009 Alle Rechte Vorbehalten. Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen.

www.peterlang.de Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft

SPIEL 25 (2006), H. 1

Mediale Wende - Ansprüche, Konzepte und Diskurse /

Mediatic turn - Claims, Concepts, and Discourses

hrsg. von / ed. by

Theo Hug (Innsbruck) Die Heftbezeichnung SPIEL 25 (2006), H. 1 ist produktionstechnischen Gründen geschuldet und bezieht sich nicht auf das tatsächliche Erscheinungsjahr dieses Bandes, 2008. Dafür bittet die Redaktion um Verständnis. Das Heft wird zitiert: Theo Hug (Hg.), 2008: Mediale Wende - Ansprüche, Konzepte und Diskurse. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. (= special issue SPIEL, 25 (2006), H. 1).

Owing to technical reasons of production, the title SPIEL 25 (2006), H. 1 does not refer to the actual year of publication of this issue. The editorial team asks for the readers’ indulgence. The issue is cited as follows: Theo Hug (ed.), 2008: Mediatic tum - Claims, Concepts, and Discourses. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. (= special issue SPIEL, 25 (2006), H. 1). Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft

Contents / Inhalt SPIEL 25 (2006), H. 1

Theo Hug (Innsbruck) Introductory Note 1

Reinhard Margreiter (Innsbruck) Interdiskursive Medienphilosophie 5

Gebhard Rusch (Siegen) The Many Mediatic Turns... and a Significant Difference 23

Christina Slade (Sydney, Utrecht) From the Linguistic to the Mediatic Turn: The case of virtual Reality 35

Marianne van den Boomen (Utrecht) Transcoding metaphors after the mediatic turn 47

Hans-Martin Schdnherr-Mann (Munchen) Die Metaphysik im Weltbild des mediatic turn 59

Goran Sonesson (Lund) On the Monitor, darkly. From Mediation to Media by Way of Reality 73

Sybiile Kramer (Berlin) Das .postalische Prinzip’: Versuch einer Rehabilitierung des Ubertragens 89 Oliver Lerone Schultz (Berlin) Augmented Embodiment. Excavated Dynamics of Media Theory - Critical Inlets to the (Second) Medial Turn 99

Norm Friesen (Vancouver) Communication Genres and the Mediatic Turn 105

Theo Hug (Innsbruck) Media Pedagogy under the Auspices of the mediatic turn - An Explorative Sketch with Programmatic Intention 117

Andreas Strohl (Munchen) How Personalized Media Create Millions of Operators - Vilem Flusser’s Take on Apparatus Culture and Media Literacy 137

RUBRIC

Daniela Pscheida (Halle) Wissensmodelle im Wandel: Vom Modus wahrer Erkenntnis zum Modus situativen Konsenses 149 10.3726/80107_73

SPIEL 25 (2006) H. i, 73-88

Gör an Sonesson (Lund / S)

On the Monitor, darkly. From Mediation to Media by Way of Reality

Wenn das Ganze der Realität auf irgendeine Weise mediaiisiert ist, wie dies von Peirce, Cassirer und Vygotsky verstanden worden ist, dann fragt sich, was sich beim Gebrauch dieses Ausdrucks ändert, wenn (Massen-)medien die Aufgabe der Zuschreibung von Bedeutungen übernehmen. Mit anderen Worten: In weichem Sinne können wir von einer medialen Wende sprechen, wenn die Humangeschichte, zumindest seit sie human wurde, sich als medienvermittelte gewandelt hat? Die Schwierigkeit ist mit dem Kommunikationsmodell verbunden, das für die Befassung mit telegra- fischen und Radioübertragungen entwickelt worden ist, und das gegenwärtig in der Semiotik, Kommunikationstheorie und andernorts zur Analyse aller Arten von Kommunikation einschließ- lich face-to-face Kommunikation angewendet wird. Diese Konfusion macht verständlich, dass manchmal behauptet wird, dass Medien nicht einmal vermitteln, sondern schlicht Realität wider- spiegeln. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird die Behauptung kritisch untersucht, die Umberto Eco in seiner jüngsten Kritik der Ikonizität formuliert hat, und derzufolge das Fernsehen überhaupt nicht mediaiisiert ist, weil es wie ein Spiegel, der einen anderen Spiegel zeigt, selbst Realität darstellt. Indem die Idee des Spiegels als Nicht-Zeichen sowie die Parallele zwischen einer Kette von Spiegeln und Fernsehübertragungen zurückgewiesen werden, wird anderen Betrachtungsweisen Beachtung geschenkt, bei denen Fernsehen und auch Internet-Kommunikation an der Realität teilhaben, wenngleich diese bereits medienvermittelt ist.______

When students of the (mass) media tell us, either to complain about the fact or extol it, that reality is becoming increasingly mediated, they no doubt mean to suggest that we more and more have access to our environment only by means of a number of technical, often socially instituted, apparatuses, which tend to have an institutionally delimited in- group as senders and a collective audience. Psychologists, such as, notably, Vygotsky, use the term mediation to describe the process by means of which something is conveyed by signs, normally linguistic signs. Mediation, in this sense, is a stage in the development of all children, which has existed ever since the ancestors of Homo sapiens took a different route in evolution from the other apes, inventing signs such as language, gesture, and pictures. Semioticians, finally, such a Peirce and Cassirer, appear to use the term in a still more general sense, applying it to all kinds of meaning, which is accessible to us, as well as to all other animals, differently in each case, already in direct perception. Peirce, notably, decides to abandon the term “sign” because it appears to him to be too narrow. Cassirer, who sees in the “symbolic forms” something peculiar to human beings, would apparently admit that, also in the variegated worlds experienced by animals of other species, there is some kind of mediation. This is a type of meaning, which, at least in part, is determined already by the nature of sense organs and limbs possessed by the organism. It is a kind of constraint that comes close to being anatomical. 74 Goran Sonesson

How to lift the dead hand of information theory

Mediation in the sense of Vygotsky is not technically informed, in any real sense, because it depends of extensions, which are more directly connected to the human body (to which must be counted elementary writing and drawing utensils). It does not have any institutionalized in-group as senders, but depends instead on a mutual collectivity of addressers and addressees. Because it is ruled by norms, mediation in this sense also could be considered some kind of constraint imposed on the individual subject, but it is clear that, without these constraints, the subject would not even be a subject, because this very exchange of signs contributes to defining it as such. As for mediation in the sense of Peirce and Cassirer, it may in part be biologically determined, and in other parts it is constituted by cultural meanings, which are so deeply entrenched, that they only become visible in the comparison between the lifeworlds of different animals or different human groups. Thus, the different meanings of the objects we call chairs (“something to sit on”) and tables (“something to put things on which we are handling, etc.”) are not there for the fly or the dog, nor for human groups who sit on the ground and put all the objects they handle there, too. Even today most studies of media in communication as well as semiotics rely, more or less explicitly, on the communication model derived from the mathematical theory of information, which was designed to describe a few, by now rather old-fashioned, techno- logical means of communication, telegraphy and radio, and in particular to devise reme- dies to the loss of information often occurring during transportation. Largely because of the influence of Jakobson (1960) and Eco 1976; 1977), this model has been used inside semiotics as a model of all communication, all signification, and of all kinds of semiosis. This practice has produced at least two symmetrical, equally negative, consequences: by reducing all kinds of semiosis to the mass media kind, in particular to that employed by radio and telegraphy, we become unable to understand the specificity of more direct forms of communication; and by treating all semiosis as being on a par, we deprive ourselves of the means to understand the intricacies added to direct communication by means of different varieties of technological mediation. Taken together, this means that we dispose of no way of explaining the effects of the multiple mediations having accrued to the immediately given world of our experience in the last century. Beyond this, we may even discover a third, even more serious consequence: by projecting the commu- nication model onto each and every form for conveying meaning, we lose sight of that which is really common to all kinds of semiosis. The most well-know criticism, of course, is that the model relies on a spatial meta- phor, i.e., it emphasises the analogy with communication in the sense of trains, cars, etc., construing all meaning as some kind of object travelling from one point in space to another. More importantly from our point of view, however, the idea of there being a message moving from one point in space to another tends to obliterate the fact that, in many cases, other instances of the communication situation have to accomplish the movement, or to be active in other ways. Indeed, the displacements required of the sender and the receiver constitute one of the principal factors distinguishing different media in general, and modem and traditional media in particular. Until recently, to send a fax, the On the Monitor, darkly 75

sender had to go to the telegraph station, but now he may accomplish the same act from his computer - or perhaps rather, send an e-mail or a text message on the mobile phone, or engage in a video conference. In fact, changes in this respect are responsible for the utopia termed “the global village” by MacLuhan and “the third wave” by Toffler: they have to do, at least in part, with the subject being now able to accomplish from his home what would earlier have required an appreciable spatial displacement (cf. Sonesson 1987; 1995; 1997a). Curiously, the temporal metaphor also embodied in the communication model has not come in for scrutiny: what is accomplished by the sender as well as by the receiver are acts in time, which may be close but do not coincide. This is true of the telegraph, but not of everyday face-to-face interaction, nor of the messenger travelling during many years. It applies even more awkwardly to the case of media having to be recreated before being received, such as a piece of music or, in a different way, a movie. Once again, the communication model obliterates precisely those changes which characterise the age of information: even pictures have now become temporal acts, as testified by the television image and even more the picture imported from some Web server, not to mention the Quick Time or Flash movie on the web page. Instead of a continuous process initiated by a subject and affecting another, commu- nication really should be seen as a double set of acts, which may coincide spatially and/or temporally, but often do not, and which are initiated by at least two different subjects, the sender and the receiver, or, to choose more appropriate terms, the creator and the concretises Curiously, the case of the radio, and to some extent even the tele- graph, should really have suggested this model: no matter how much a program is broad- cast, no communication will take place until somebody puts his radio receiver on. Nowa- days, when we have to start up our computer, connect to the Internet service provider, start the e-mail program and then fetch our mail on the server, we get an even more acute idea of the double initiative required for communication to take place. The temporal presupposition entails another one: before the moment of sending, there is a subject making a decision to send. This is very clear in the case of the telegraph and other technological means: one must decide to go to the telegraph station or to open the Fax software of the home computer. There is much less clearly a preparatory stage, a phase of decision which can be separated from the act of sending, in ordinary verbal conversation, gesture, and so on. Quite apart from the distinction between machines and men in the part of addresser and addressee (made, curiously, by Shannon & Weaver, but obliterated by Jakobson and Eco), we really need to have more instances, not less, in order to account for the complexities of sending and receiving. Several subjects are in- volved in the sending of a book: the writer, the editor, the editorial board, the proof- reader, the typesetter (nowadays largely identical with the writer in front of his com- puter), the enterprise doing the distribution, the critique, the bookseller, the one who buys the book as a present, etc. Fortunately, there seem to be norms determining who the important sender of different kinds of messages is. The general view in our culture, for instance, is that the author is a more important sender of a book than his printer; but in some cases, as that of the critique or other avatar of the gatekeeper, the layman and the scholar take different views on the matter. In the case of ancient media, however, these norms are not always easy to recover; and they are not always fixed in the case of the 76 Goran Sonesson new ones. There is an extreme opposition between medieval art, where the donator was the sender who counted, and modem art, where the artist is considered the sender of “ready-mades”, and even, as is the case of the artist Dan Wolgers, of an exhibition, which he ordered from an advertising agency (Sonesson 1998b). Modem media all the time confront us with cases in which it is not possible to distinguish one single - or even one most important - sender of the message communicated. In the end, however, this difficulty is perhaps not peculiar to recent media. When reflecting on the sense in which my own life is a story I tell to myself, Ricceur (1990: 189) suggests that I am myself the principal personage as well as the narrator, but only a co-author, or, in Aristotelian terms, the “sunaiton”; for the life which I live will be determined as much by the acts of other people and by the obstacles reality makes to my wishes, as by the plot I have written for myself. It will be remembered that Bakhtin found such a collusion of hero and author suspect, in literature if not also in life. And yet the Bakhtinean “ventriloquation” seems to describe a case in which I am only one of the authors of what I say (cf. Sonesson 1999a, 2001; 2007). It is the particular co- authorship of the instances of the media that really distinguishes mediation by the media from mediation in more general senses.

The mirror (image) as sign

In his recent work, Eco has argued the case for the mirror not being a sign, and television being simply a chain of mirrors. This would amount to a reduction, not only of sign mediation, but also of media mediation, to mediation in the most general sense (which Eco would not even consider a mediation, but reality itself). According to the theory first presented in Eco’s (1984) dictionary entry on the mirror, and enlarged upon in his recent writings (1997, 1998, 1999), the mirror is no sign. In particular, Eco quotes seven reasons for denying the sign status of the mirror, which can be summarised as follows: 1) Instead of standing for something it stands before something (the mirror image is not present in the absence of its referent); 2) It is causally produced by its object; 3) It is not independent of the medium or the channel by means of which it is conveyed; 4) It cannot be used for lying; 5) It does not establish a relationship between tokens through the intermediary of types; 6) It does not suggest a content (or only a general one such as “human being”); 7) It cannot be interpreted further (only the object to which it refers can). On Eco’s account, then, the mirror is pre-semiotic, i.e. it is not a sign - which is not to say that Eco ever defines the sign. Edmund Husserl (1939) has characterized the sign as something consisting of an expression, which is directly perceived, but not in focus, and a content, which is indirectly perceived while at the same time being the focus of the relation. According to Jean Piaget the sign function (which Piaget himself called first the symbolic, and later on the semiotic, function) is a capacity acquired by the child at an age of around 18 to 24 months, which enables him or her to imitate something or somebody outside the direct presence of the model, to use language, make drawings, play “symbolically”, and have access to mental imagery and memory. The common factor On the Monitor, darkly 77

underlying all these phenomena, according to Piaget, is the ability to represent reality by means of a signifier, which is distinct from the signified. Indeed, Piaget argues that the child’s experience of meaning predates the sign function, but that such meaning does not suppose a differentiation of signifier and signified (see Piaget 1945, 1967, 1970). In several of the passages in which he refers to the sign function, Piaget goes on to point out that “indices” and “signals” are possible long before the age of 18 months, but only because they do not suppose any differentiation between expression and content. This would account for mediation in the widest sense, which I introduced above. The signifier of the index, Piaget (1967, 134f) says, is “an objective aspect of the signified”; thus, for instance, the visible extremity of an object which is almost entirely hidden from view is the signifier of the entire object for the baby, just as the tracks in the snow stand for the prey to the hunter. But when the child uses a pebble to signify candy, he is well aware of the difference between them, which implies, as Piaget tells us, “a differentiation, from the subject’s own point of view, between the signifier and the signified” (ibid.). It is important to note that, while the signifier of the index is said to be an objective aspect of the signified, we are told that in the sign and the “symbol” (i.e., in Piaget’s terminology, the conventional and the motivated variant of the sign function, respectively) expression and content are differentiated from the point of view of the subject - a distinction Piaget immediately seems to forget. We can, however, imagine this same child that in Piaget’s example uses a pebble to stand for a piece of candy having recourse instead to a feather in order to represent a bird, or employ a pebble to stand for a rock, without therefore confusing the part and the whole: then the child would be employing a feature, which is objectively a part of the bird, or the rock, while differentiating the former form the latter from his point of view. Differentiation may mean that the expression does not continuously go over into the content in time and/or space; or that expression and content are conceived as being of different nature. In both senses, the mirror is certainly as sign. The person or thing in front of the mirror is clearly differentiated from the image in the mirror. The kind of differentiation which does not obtain for animals and children is apparently not the one involving a discontinuity in time and/or space (they do not think the mirror image is part of themselves) but rather that concerned with the different nature of the two correlates (the cat takes the mirror image of a cat to be another cat). In my interpretation of Peirce (cf. Sonesson 1992a, 1998a, 2000a; in press), the ground is that which picks out some properties of the object serving as expression and well as of the object serving as content by virtue of which they are connected to form a sign. It is a principle of relevance, or, as Peirce says, of abstraction: in the case of an icon, it is for instance the blackness of two black things. Thus, the ground serves to “motivate” the connection between expression and content: it is similarity in the icon, and contiguity or something of the kind in the index. Since iconicity is Firstness, it can only be a list of properties. The iconic ground adds a relationship between two such lists. It is thus already Secondness. The case of indexicality is different: since it concerns contiguity or the relationship between part and whole (henceforth factorality), it already as such involves relations. However, the sign as such is also a relation (the semiotic function), which thus has to be combined with the iconic or indexical grounds. In this sense, the pictorial sign depends on the existence of a whole set of relations. But so does 78 Goran Sonesson the mirror, as we shall see. Let us start with Eco’s first argument, according to which the sign, but not the mirror, supposes the absence of the referent. In the case of many signs, the content (or rather the referent) is present together with the expression. Many signs function in the way they function only in presence of their referent: this is the case with those pictures of birds with the names of their species written below them which are attached to the bird case in the zoo. Indeed it is the case with much of our language use: for although the female personal pronoun, for instance, figures extensively in the absence of a possible referent, it does not tell us very much; and talking about the gorilla in front of it adds more than only shades of meaning (cf. Sonesson 2003). Of course, bird pictures, and much of verbal language, function also in the absence of their referent, although they function differently. Other signs, however, are more radically dependant on their referents. Indeed, weathercocks, pointing fingers, cast shadows, and a lot of other signs cannot mean what they mean, if not in the presence of the object they refer to. Indeed, as we shall se, co-presence is a precondition at least for one kind of indexical sign. The sign character of these signs only endures as long as the object is in their presence, and such was no doubt originally the case also with personal pronouns such as “I”. The classical definition of the sign, which Eco here refers to, is wrong in requiring the absence of the referent. Differentiation must be distinguished from absence (cf. Sonesson 1992b, 2003, in press). We shall now have a look at the second argument, which says that the mirror image is causally produced by its object, which is not the case with the picture sign. Thus, causality is taken to exclude the sign character. This is curious, because one of Peirce’s most currently quoted definitions of the index (which is a sign) says that it depends on a causal relation between expression and content. In fact, a lot of indices depend on causality, from the knock on the door (caused by the hand) to the cast shadow, the death mask and - something that is definitely also a picture - the photograph. However, if we choose to define indices in terms of causality, then - following the “structural argument” which is have formulated elsewhere (cf. Sonesson 2000a) - it will be impossible to exhaust the domain of signs by means of only three sign types: indeed, many examples of indices given by Peirce are certainly not causal. ’’Real connection” (exemplified most notably by contiguity and factorality) is therefore at better definition of indexicality. Even if causality does not define the sign function, nor even the peculiar kind of sign termed index, it is not incompatible with it. Pronouns like “I” change their meaning each time they are used yet retain the meaning once they are written down (or, one might add, when the speech is recorded on tape). The mirror, Eco contends, continues to change its meaning for ever. However, the weathercock, one of Peirce's favourite examples of an index, behaves in all these respects more like the mirror than like the pronoun: if sent as a message from the seasonal resort, it will indicate the direction of the wind at the place where the receiver lives, not that which the sender observed before putting the device into the parcel. This is not to say that the weathercock functions exactly as the mirror. The difference between the mirror, the pronoun and the weathercock has to do with the relative importance of the constant and variable element in the meaning, that is, with Eco’s “content”. This thus brings us to the sixth argument, according to which the mirror does not On the Monitor, darkly 79

suggest a content, or only a general one such as “human being”. The difference between the pronoun, the mirror, and the weathercock depends on how far the constant elements of signification (Eco’s “content”) go in a sign. We know that “I” refers to the speaker or writer using a particular instance of the sign, and there are usually other ways of dis- covering who the speaker or writer is, or at least that he is not identical to ourselves. The constant element of the weathercock is the indication of the direction of the wind in the here and now. The constant element of the mirror is the rendering of something visible placed presently in front of it. The variable elements are too many ever to be retrievable; but it may yet be maintained that they all share a number of predicates, such as being visible, present in the here and now, and so on. The opposition that Eco posits between mirrors and signs is seemingly the same as other thinkers (e.g. Gombrich) have always postulated as a difference between pictorial and verbal signs. It is often expressed as a difference between singularity and generality. A picture, it is said, can only show an individual person, not “a guard in general”, but some very particular guard with individual features. As applied to pictures, these arguments are no doubt wrong. It is possible to construct very abstract or schematic pictures (children’s drawings or logograms, for instance), which only convey very general facts. Indeed they are about “a woman in general”, etc. But even a photograph with an abundance of individual detail will only signify to me something like “a young woman dressed in 1920ies apparel”, if I do not happen to know the person in question. This also pertains to mirrors: while looking at myself in the mirror, I may suddenly see some configuration, which I interpret, as “a man appearing behind my back”. I do not have to recognise him as Frankenstein’s monster to be frightened. In mirrors, as in pictures, singularity is not, in the last instance, in the sign, but in the use to which we put the sign. According to Eco, the mirror image is not an index for the person in front of the mirror, because we do not need it in order to know this fact; only the lack of an image when the Invisible Man or a vampire passes in front of the mirror could perhaps be admitted to be a symptom. Nor is a mark on the nose observed in a mirror an index, Eco says, because it is no different from the mark we observe directly on our hand. However, these observations are irrelevant. The fact that we may see an object, and know that it is there, without it having been pointed out to us, does not make the pointing finger less of a sign, and indeed an index. Nor does the weathercock cease being an index just because we may be able to discover the direction of the wind already from the impact it has on our body. Curiously, Eco all the time talks as if mirrors where only used to look at ourselves. In fact, mirrors are not only used for seeing oneself but for seeing others and other things. Some mirror types are actually specialised for such purposes. The rear mirror of a car is used for discovering other cars coming from behind. A dentist uses a mirror to investi- gate the status of our teeth. Indeed, a woman may know very well that she has lips, and still use a mirror to ascertain that she is putting the lipstick on to her best advantage. Even supposing that Eco’s argument would have some relevance, these mirrors are not used to show something that is known beforehand, as the presence of cars, teeth, or lips, but to investigate special properties of these objects. 80 Goran Sonesson

Thus, they are not “symptoms”, if we take this word in the ordinary language sense of an indexical sign that is unintentionally emitted.

Photographs and mirrors

When claiming, in the third argument, that the mirror is not independent of the medium or channel by which it is conveyed, Eco may be referring to the different materials employed, or to the fact of transference being possible.1 Historically, mirrors have been made out of different “substances”, that is, different materials: once upon a time, they were made from metal sheets, which explains that Saint Paul could talk of us seeing “obscurely, as in a mirror”. In this sense, the argument is historically wrong. On the other hand, if Eco means to say that a particular instance of mirroring is not transferable from one mirror to another, then something equivalent is true of many signs. If so, this criterion is hardly possible to distinguish from the fifth one, according to which signs suppose types to be mediated by tokens. We may certainly agree that mirrors do not comply with the fifth criterion — but neither do paintings existing in one single copy (if we do not admit the reproductions as tokens, which most art historians would vehemently deny). Nor do any momentary signs comply with this criterion, from pointing fingers to weathercocks or cast shadows. For though the finger may endure, as does the mirror, the particular act of pointing, just as that of mirroring, does not repeat itself, nor does it admit a change of “substance”. Indeed, strictly speaking, it is not the mirror which is a sign, but the mirror image. The notion of momentary signs does not appear to exist for Eco, and yet it is an important one. However, if we exclude all signs that are only momentarily signs of something, most of the examples given by Peirce and others will not be eligible as signs. You do not have to cut off a finger and send it off by post for it to change completely its meaning; even in its natural position, the content to which it points is continuously changing. In fact, weathercocks, pointing fingers, and pronouns, seem to have functioned (and functioned as signs) much like the mirror, before different techniques for preserving tokens (as opposed to types) of signs were invented, a process which perhaps begun with writing and now has reached the state of computer memory. This is also the only reason Eco quotes for not recognising my suggestion (from Sonesson 1989a) that the mirror is a “hard icon”: the indexicality and iconicity of the mirror is only momentary. But this reason will not do, since it would force us to deny the sign status of numerous other signs. The term “Hard icons” was coined by Tomas Maldonado (1974) to describe signs, which, in addition to bearing resemblance to that which they depict, are related to them as traces to that which produced them. Examples would be X-ray pictures, hand impressions on cave walls, ‘acoustic pictures’ made with the aid of ultrasound, sil- houettes, configurations left on the ground by people who were out walking in Hiroshima

1 The first is the common interpretation of Louis Hjelmslev’s distinction between form and substance, but the latter is closer to being the correct one. On the Monitor, darkly 81

at the moment of the explosion of the nuclear bomb, thermograms, pictures made with ‘invisible light5 to discover persons hiding in the woods - and ordinary photographs. The real contiguity between the picture and its referent is here taken to guarantee the cognitive value of the picture. It is important to note that ‘hard icons’ cannot simply be signs which are both indexical and iconic, for that is true also of hand-made pictures: there must be coincidence between their respective indexical and iconic grounds. Then there is the fourth argument, according to which the mirror cannot be used for lying. Of course mirrors lie. The very business of the mirrors in the Fun House is to do just that (Vilchez 1983). They lie in a systematic way: there is always the same distance between the referent and the picture object, at least from a given position in front of the mirror, so there is actually a content (i.e. a type), which mediates between the subject and the mirror image. If distorting mirrors are possible, then all mirrors are no doubt somewhat distorting (as are all photographs), although we are too accustomed to them to realise it (cf. Sonesson 1989b, 1999a, 2001). So the mirror image is also conveyed to us with the fidelity permitted by its particular channel. This all amounts to saying that, like the picture, the mirror has its “ground”, its principle of relevance. In fact, there are no zero-degree mirrors: as people who use mirrors professionally, from dentists to sales clerks at the dressmakers, will readily point out to us, all mirrors are adapted to particular uses. Actually all mirrors lie, or, more precisely, they interpret: they are adapted to different professional uses, the “channel” having a particular fraction in the case of the dentist, a particular tint for the dressmakers, etc. In some ways, mirrors are much like photographs (except for the latter not being momentary signs). Indeed, what Barthes (1964) claimed about the photograph is similar to what Eco says about the mirror: that expression and content cannot be distinguished. However, Barthes could be taken to suggest that drawing, but not photography, requires there to be a set of rules for mapping perceptual experience onto marks made with a pen on paper; and these rules imply a particular segmentation of the world as it is given to perception, picking up some (kinds of?) features for reproduction, while rejecting others, and perhaps emphasising some properties at the same time as others are underplayed; and all this takes place under given historical circumstances, which are responsible for varying the emphases and the exclusions. This idea becomes more reasonable when expressed as a difference between the kind of mapping rules involved in photography and hand-made pictures, respectively. If we look upon the relationship between the pictorial content and its referent in the outside world as a kind of indexicality, more in particular as a factorality (a relation of part to whole), we may interpret Barthes to claim that photography is able to pick up particular proper parts (‘son sujet’, ‘son cadre’) and perceptual angles of vision (‘son angle’) of the whole motive, but cannot chose to render just a few of its attributes. In some all too obvious ways this is false: for essential reasons, photography only transmits visual properties, and it only conveys such features as are present on the sides of the object fronting the camera. Also, depending on the distance between the camera and the motive, only features contained in a particular range of sizes may be included. As long as no trick photography is involved, however, it seems to be true that, without recurring to later modification of the exposed material, photography is merely able to nick up features, or restrict its selection of features, on the global level, whereas 82 Goran Sonesson

in drawing, local decisions can be made for each single feature (cf. Sonesson 1989b, 36ff; Dubois 1983, 96f). This also applies to all other rules of photographic transposition listed by Ramirez (1981, 158ff) and Gubem (1974, 50ff): abolition of the third dimen- sion, the delimitation of space through the frame, the exclusion of movement, mono-focal and static vision, granular, discontinuous structure of the expression plane, abolition or distortion of colour, limitation to scenes having a certain range of luminosity, and abolition of non-visual stimuli. Like the transformation rules of photography, those of the mirror image are global. The photograph, however, is different from the mirror image in not being a momentary sign. Elsewhere, I have contrasted the photograph with a more genuine index such as the footprint (cf. Sonesson 1999a; 2001). Although both arise at a particular point in time and space, the former, like a linguistic sign, retains a signification everywhere, whereas the latter only signifies in the manner of a trace when it remains in the same place as it was produced: only there can it tell us about the presence of the animal or person at that very place. Momentary signs, such as mirrors, shadows, and weathercocks, however, are different again: they can only signify what they signify at the same time and place when and where they are produced. Eco’s final argument, the seventh one, says that there is no chain of interpretants resulting from the mirror as in the case of the sign. The mirror cannot be interpreted further - only the object to which it refers can. But of course the mirror may be the starting-point for a chain of interpretations, just as any feature of the common sense Lifeworld. That is what the dentist does, the woman applying her lipstick in front of the mirror, the driver who sees a car coming up behind him, the person seeing the monster (which is not a vampire) in the mirror, etc. Eco would say this amounts to interpreting the object, but this would require us to have accepted his other arguments. If mirrors are adapted to their particular uses, as we just saw, then it really is a question of interpreting the object as it is given in the mirror, roughly similar to the interpretation of objects through the intermediary of a picture. I therefore conclude that Eco is wrong about the mirror, just as Barthes was wrong about the photograph. The mirror image is a sign, if anything is.

Television beyond the chain or mirrors

To Eco, the argument against the sign character of the mirror merely serves as a preparation for claiming that the television image is like a chain of mirrors reproducing each other, with the proviso that instead of mirror reflections, there is an electronical signal connecting the separate instances. Television does not involve signs, he submits, but only a channel, just as the mirror, or, more generally, a prosthesis, which does not magnify, as the telescope, but gives access to places where we are not present. According to Eco, there is no expression plane separate from the content, just as was the case of the mirror. In the same way as a telescope or a mirror, the television image is experienced as a direct view of reality, which may be trusted to be true. It is my contention, however, that no matter what we conceive mirrors to be, television pictures are no more similar to On the Monitor, darkly 83

mirrors than other pictures. Even Eco admits that television is only ’’para-specular”. This is to say that the analogy has limitations. It will only hold good as long as the camera is fixed and shows everything that goes on at a particular place, at the moment of occurrence. Also, the television image has a lower definition than the mirror. Again, the television image is smaller than the real objects reproduced, and it is not possible to peek sideways into it to discover new objects, as we can do in the mirror. But Eco contends that these limitations can be overcome: the picture can be made bigger, and the definition higher, as is already the case with the intestinal probe. And when the probe moves around, we can also see obliquely, as in the mirror. The first, and fundamental, retort one could make to this theory is that Eco is talking about an ideal case, which is ideal to the point of having almost no existence. In fact, today a very tiny part of what is seen on television is really transmitted directly. Moreover, modem computer techniques make it possible to manipulate even that which is directly transmitted. In any case, the television signal is already as such different from the reality it reproduces, for the same reasons that this can be said about photography: everything, from the light conditions, the nature of the camera and other equipment, the transmission signal, etc, introduce modifications between the referent and its image, quite comparable to those which exist in other pictures (cf. Sonesson 1989b, 1999a, 2001, in press). They are, in Ricceur’s sense, co-authors of the television display. Indeed, the effect of overcoming the limitations to which Eco points would rather be to bring the television image closer to the picture. Higher definition would make television more similar to ordinary pictures. Bigger size at least does nothing to distinguish television from pictures. The intestinal probe does not in any way permit us to peek into the image sideways, as the mirror does; it simply gives rise to new images, as it moves around, just as any camera would. Actually, the hologram, which Eco apparently still counts as a picture,2 does make it possible, to a limited extent, to change perspectives within the picture, and so does, in a more impressing manner, the computer devices connected with “virtual reality”. But as I have shown elsewhere, even this is not enough to make either one indistinguishable from reality (cf. Sonesson 1997b, 2007). Indeed, although both mirrors and pictures are signs, they are no doubt different in other ways: To begin with, the mirror, unlike the picture, really permits us to see new things on its surface, as it (or that which is in front of it) is moved, and none of these variations is more “true” than the others. This observation does not apply to pictures, not even to television pictures or pictures projected onto surfaces generally, because in those cases the variations are always accompanied by modifications to the surface projections. In the case of the mirror, there is really nothing which corresponds to the expression, for there are no lines, points or pixels (no “plastic language”), or anything which may be observed as such, independently of the depth projection to which they give rise. Thus, there is no “seeing in” or “resemantisation” in mirrors: no projection from the whole to the particularities of the parts (cf. Sonesson 1989a; 1995). Eco’s next step it to generalise what he has said so far about television to pictures in

2 The hologram is mentioned in a note added to the English version (Eco 1999, 427) but does not appear in the Italian original (Eco 1997). 84 Goran Sonesson general: now he imagines the film, the photograph, the hyperrealistic painting etc. as “frozen” mirror images. The difference between these “frozen mirror images” and the real ones (as well as the not as yet refrigerated ones of television) is that expression now is separate from content and thus can survive the disappearance of the latter. Very little seems to be left for the conventionalist theory of pictures, which, in other passages, Eco seems willing to maintain, in spite of certain modifications. We are back where we started, before Eco’s first critique, at Barthes’ “message without a code”. And once again, iconicity appears as a complete mystery.

Reality as part of the picture

There are much better instance of the ideal case imagined by Eco than television: the surveillance camera and the web cam, whether it shows the coffee automaton at the office, a view from Venice, or a young girl at home, do really depend, for their meaning, on instant (or once having been instantaneous) transmission. Here, for all practical purposes, the act of sending and the act of receiving do coincide. We can readily admit that direct transmission in important to some parts of the programming of some television channels, notably the news on CNN or BBC. Clearly, instant transmission is a potential of the constructional kind we call video, which it does not share with photography or traditional cinema. But this is not a fact about the circulatory kind known as television. As elsewhere, I use term constructional kind to refer to a division of semiotic resources according to the relation between expression and content, functional kind to describe a parallel division based on the socially expected purposes associated with semiotic resources, and circulatory kind for the division according to the channel conveying them from sender to receiver. If people believe what they see on television, this is so, not because of the identity of television to reality, as Eco claims, but because people attribute authority to it, just as they do in the case of the radio, or certain trusted newspapers. This has nothing to do with the reality of television. It says much more about television as a circulatory kind and certain television programs as functional kinds than about video as constructional kind. Direct transmission is certainly not what predominates in present-day television. However, there are at present ways in which the distinction between the television image and reality may be blurred, which cannot even be studied if their identity is posited from the start. First, there is the model for approaching reality based on construction. What today is anticipated as 3D television is being developed using two different techniques: volumetric displays with moving or multiple flat screens; and holographic images which construct the objects piecemeal allowing you to walk around them partway. Only a little step seems to remain from doubling reality. Unlike sculptures, dummies, wax figures, scarecrows, toys, etc. which are some kind of identity signs (cf. Sonesson 1989a, 137- 146, 324-341), the hologram is without a doubt a picture; it provides a surface where a real scene of perception is ’’seen in” or ’’perceptually imagined” (cf. Sonesson 1989a, On the Monitor, darkly 85

163-173). The surface and the scene are at the same time present to perception, at the same time conscious, but experienced as excluding one another. On the contrary, the sculpture is an object by its own right that represents another object of which it lacks some characteristics. It is a solid object, whereas the hologram is made entirely out of light. Consequently, the hologram is a picture. The difference is only that the illusion of reality is much stronger, and that to some extent different perspectives on the same object are available according as the spectator moves around the picture, just as in true perceptual experience in the Lifeworld. Husserl has observed that the perceptual world rests on the sentiment that it is “always possible to go ahead”; to see objects from different angles, to come closer to the object in order to discover new characteristics, to investigate it in other circumstances. In this respect, the hologram is a distinct advance.3 Nevertheless, the illusion of the reality is never total; the picture character - and with it the sign character - is always given at the same time in perception. Like all holograms, 3D television must fail the reality test contained in the etcetera principle: we can only walk halfway around them without discovering the trick. Not even this is true: the hologram may contain the “same” information as a walk halfway around the object - but is does not offer the same “qualia” (way of experiencing it). When television and video recorders were still more or less on the experimental stage, the novelist Adolfo Bioy Casares (1940) told a story about a man stranded on a “deserted” island where he observes a number of persons who are talking and acting just as in ordinary life, who, in the end, turn out to be the result of some kind of video recordings. These recordings are three-dimensional projections and contain all the sensory modalities. Thus, the only thing separating them from real life is the impossibility for the man of interacting with them. This, as it happens, is most unfortunate form him, since he falls in love with one of the women and is unable to communicate with her. A 3D television (in direct transmission or not) along these lines would add a further twist: it would comply with the communication model of the theory of information. Sending a message would be some kind of transport - like sending a parcel by mail. This is remarkable, because the process by which messages are conveyed is ordinarily very different from the transference of an object from one place to another (cf. Sonesson 1999b). 3D television would be very similar to what is described in science fiction as “teleporting” or “dematerialisation”. Interestingly, however, the purpose of those (ima- ginary) processes is the transference of an individual object from one place to another. This is certainly not what television is for: no matter how confusingly close to reality products of 3D television would be, they would simply be tokens of a central message type. They would be transferred at the same time to numerous different places in the world. In this way, they are like contemporary television or like web pages. A circulatory model for the fusion of television and reality is already true. The “format” which in different varieties has dominated television for the last decades is “reality television”. The claim of this kind of programs to have something to do with

3 Virtual reality would seem to go much further, were it not for the hiatus between illusion and reality introduced by the unwieldy character of the equipment needed. 86 Gôran Sonesson reality does not rest in any way on direct transmission, as Eco would make us expect. On the contrary, “reality television” is clearly edited, put together from a choice of different recordings, combined without any respect for time and space, “co-authored” by different subject connected with the televisory apparatus. Of course, the reality claim does not have anything to do either, at least not for now, with holography or telepresence. The link to reality is more indexical than iconical: like in a “performance”, in the art historical sense, as opposed to theatre, onstage life is supposed to go on, and/or have consequences, for life outside the stage (cf. Sonesson 2000b). No doubt, as in classical versions of “performance”, the participants are not acting, in the sense of representing Hamlet or Nora, but are simply being themselves (in spite of all the artificiality that may go into their public self-image). However, there is an important difference between reality television and performance: outside of the frame in which their life is presented to an audience (subjected to the asymmetric and enduring spectacular function), the perfor- mance artists become normal subjects, but the participants in reality television continue to lead a life reported on by the other media, such as, notably, newspapers and maga- zines, were their doings are treated as being as noteworthy as the real-world players on the world-stage. This is the important sense in which reality and fiction become blurred.

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland, 1964. Rhétorique de l’image. In: Communications 4. 40-51. Bioy Casares, Adolfo, 1940. La invención de Morel. Pocket edition: Buenos Aires: Emecé Editories. Dubois, Philippe, 1983. L'acte photographique. Paris & Bruxelles: Nathan/Labor. Eco, Umberto, 1976. A theory of semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eco, Umberto, 1977. The influence of Roman Jakobson on the development of semiotics. In: Armstrong, D./ C. H. van Schooneveld (eds.). Roman Jakobson: Echoes of his scholarship, 39-58. Lisse: Peter de Ridder. Eco, Umberto, 1984. Semiotics and the philosophy of language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eco, Umberto, 1997. Kant e Vornitorinco. Milan: Bompiani Eco, Umberto, 1998. Réflexions à propos du débat sur l’iconisme (1968-1998). In: Visio, 3, 1,9-32. Eco, Umberto, 1999. Kant and the platypus. New York: Harcourt Brance & Co. Gombrich, E. H., 1963. Meditations on a hobby horse. London: Phaidon. Gubem, Roman, 1974. Mensajes icónicos en la cultura de masas. Barcelona: Lumen. Husserl, Edmund, 1939. Erfahrung und Urteil. Prag: Academia Verlagsbuchhandlung. Jakobson, Roman, 1960. Linguistics and poetics. In: Sebeok, Thomas, (éd.), Style in language, 350-377. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Maldonado, T., 1974. Vanguardia e razionalità. Turin: Einaudi Editore 1974. Peirce, Charles Sanders, 1931-58. Collected Papers I-VIH. Hartshome, C./ P. Weiss/ A. Burks (eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. On the Monitor, darkly 87

Piaget, Jean, 1945 [1967]. La formation du symbole chez Venfant. Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé. Piaget, Jean, 1967. La psychologie de Vintelligence. Paris: Armand Colin. Piaget, Jean, 1970. Epistémologie des sciences de Vhomme. Paris: Gallimard. Ramirez, Juan Antonio, 1981. Medios de masas e historia del arte. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra. Ricoeur, Paul, 1990. Soi-méme comme un autre. París: Seuil. Sonesson, Göran, 1989a. Pictorial concepts. Inquines into the semiotic heritage and its relevance for the analysis of the visual world. Lund: Aris/ Lund University Press. Sonesson, Göran, 1989b. Semiotics of photography. On tracing the index. Report from the Semiotics project. Lund: Lund University. Sonesson, Göran, 1992a. Bildbetydelser. Inledning till bildsemiotiken som vetenskap. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Sonesson, Göran, 1992b. The semiotic function and the genesis of pictorial meaning. In: Center/ Periphery in representations and institutions. Proceedings from the Conference of The International Semiotics Institute, Imatra, Finland, July 16-21, 1990., Tarasti, Eero (ed.). Imatra: Acta Semiótica Fennica, 156-211. Sonesson, Göran, 1995. On pictorality. The impact of the perceptual model in the development of visual semiotics. In: The semiotic web 1992/93: Advances in visual semiotics, Sebeok, Th., & Umiker-Sebeok, J., eds. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 67-108. Sonesson, Göran, 1996. An essay concerning images. From rhetoric to semiotics by way of ecological physics. In: Semiótica, 109-1/2, 41-140. Sonesson, Göran, 1997. The Multimediation of the Lifeworld. In: Nöth, Winfried (ed.), Semiotics of the Media. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 61-78. Sonesson, Göran, 1997b. Semiótica cultural de la sociedad de la imagen. In: Hetero- génesis, VI, 20, 16-37. Sonesson, Göran, 1998a. Entries. In: Encyclopaedia of Semiotics. Bouissac, Paul, ed., New York & London: Oxford University Press. Sonesson, Göran, 1998b. That there are many kinds of pictorial signs. In: Visio, 3, 1, 33- 54. Sonesson, Göran, 1999a. Post-photography and beyond. From mechanical reproduction to digital production. In: Visio 4, 1, 11-36. Sonesson, Göran, 1999b. The life of signs in society - and out of it. In: Semiotiké. Trudy po znakovym sistemam/ Sign system studies 26, Torop, Peeter/ Michail Lotman/ Kalevi Kuli/ Ülle Pätii (eds.). Tartu, Tartu University Press, 88-127. Sonesson, Göran, 2000a. Iconicity in the ecology of semiosis. In: Iconicity - A Fundamental Problem in Semiotics. Troels Deng Johansson/ Martin Skov/ Berit Brogaard (eds.). Aarhus: NSU Press, 59-80. Sonesson, Göran, 2000b. Action becoming art: “performance” in the context of theatre, play, ritual - and life. In: Visio 5, 3, 105-122. Sonesson, Göran, 2001. The pencils of nature and culture: New light on - and in - the Lifeworld. In: Semiótica 136-1/4, 27-53. Sonesson, Göran, 2003. Why the mirror is a sign - and why the television picture is no mirror. Two episodes in the critique of the iconicity critique. In: S. European Journal for Semiotic Studies 15(2-4), 217-232. 88 Gôran Sonesson

Sonesson, Gôran, 2005. La semiótica de imágenes - de la reproducción mecánica a la producción digital. In: Semiótica de los Mass media, Espinosa Vera, Pablo (ed.). Monterrey: Universiad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 209-236. Sonesson, Gôran, 2007. From the meaning of embodiment to the embodiment of meaning. In: Body, Language, and Mind. Vol. 1. Embodiment. Ziemke, Tom/ J. Zlatev/ R. Frank (eds.). Berlin: Mouton, 85-128. Sonesson, Gôran, (in press). Iconicity strikes back: the third generation - or why Eco still is wrong. In: Actes du 6ème Congrès de l'Association internationale de sémiotique visuelle, Québec, octobre 2001. Carani, Marie (éd.). Vilchez, Lorenzo, 1983. La lectura de la imagen. Barcelona: Paidós.

Author's Address:

Prof. Dr. Goran Sonesson Department of Semiotics, Lund University, Box 117 S - 221 00 Lund, Sweden E-mail: goran.sonesson@sem iotik.lu.se URL: http://www.arthist.lu.se/kultsem/sonesson/CV_gs. html